The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor was illegal

Source: Washington Post

The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor was illegal

Police departments continue to violate an important Supreme Court ruling — and judges keep letting them

By Radley Balko
Opinion writer
6/3/2020, 4:35:38 p.m.

Just after midnight on March 13, police in Louisville on a drug raid forced their way into the home of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman who worked as an emergency room technician. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, a licensed gun owner, woke up and grabbed his gun. According to the police, Walker then fired at them, and the police returned with a storm of at least 20 bullets, striking Taylor at least eight times, killing her. (One police officer was shot in the leg and is expected to make a full recovery.)

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In the affidavit for the no-knock warrant for Taylor’s home, a detective claimed to have consulted with a postal inspector, who confirmed that Glover had been “receiving packages” at Taylor’s address. But the Louisville postal inspector has since said that he was never consulted by the officers and that there was nothing suspicious about the packages. A source with knowledge of the case has since told me that the packages contained clothes and shoes.

Much of this has been previously reported. Here is what has yet to be reported: The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor's home was illegal.

In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the court recognized for the first time that the “Castle Doctrine” and the “knock and announce” rule are embedded in the Fourth Amendment. The Castle Doctrine, which dates back centuries to English common law, states that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. Accordingly, except for the most extreme circumstances, the police must knock, announce themselves and give time for the occupants of a home to answer the door peacefully and avoid the potential violence and destruction of a forced entry.

The Wilson ruling did allow for some exceptions, though: Most notably, if the police can show that knocking and announcing would allow a particular suspect to dispose of evidence, flee or assault the officers serving the warrant, the police can enter without knocking. After Wilson, many police departments exploited that “exigent circumstance” exception by simply declaring in search warrant affidavits that all drug dealers are a threat to dispose of evidence, flee or assault the officers at the door. So in 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Richards v. Wisconsin that this sort of blanket exception to the rule is unconstitutional. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the court’s opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens:

If a per se exception were allowed for each category of criminal investigation that included a considerable — albeit hypothetical — risk of danger to officers or destruction of evidence, the knock-and-announce element of the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement would be meaningless.